"I don't think it's right that the woman has to stay beneath the man. I think we should be equal," says Rebecca, a pink-cheeked, 20-year-old Amish woman in Punxatawney, Pennsylvania, as she handwashes clothes at 5:45 in the morning. Soon, Rebecca will trade laundry, outhouses, and floor-skimming dresses for strip clubs, jeans, and bars, in the ultimate devil's playground, New York City. With the new series Breaking Amish, TLC follows Rebecca and four other Amish and Mennonite young people living together in a Manhattan hotel on their rumspringa, the window of late adolescence in which youths venture out into the world for the first time to make an informed decision whether austere religious life is for them. From the show's teasers, Rebecca, Sabrina, Kate, Abe, and Jeremiah will get drunk and tattooed, spin on stripper poles, and discover a little more equality between the sexes, while also pining for the simple life they left behind.

Breaking Amish is the latest addition to The Learning Channel's (commonly known as The Leering Channel) provocative reality TV programming. Once a boring educational channel where you could watch a documentary on the spotted owl or get tips for cooking the perfect soufflé, TLC is now the go-to place for gawking. Breaking Amish appears alongside 19 Kids and Counting about the fertile Duggar family; Abby and Brittany, which follows a set of conjoined twins as they navigate college life; Sister Wives, which may instigate the formation of a Mormon Anti-Defamation League; and the self-explanatory freakshows: My Strange Addiction, My Crazy Obsession, and Strange Sex. Breaking Amish is a hybrid of the ethnic minstrel show—along the lines of Jersey Shore or Shahs of Sunset, where a culture is reduced to its caricature parts—and The Real World, where good looking twentysomethings live together in a new city, full of possibilities. (All of the Amish stars of the show are remarkably good-looking. One imagines plucky TLC producers hiding behind barns with binoculars to do their casting). But what sets Breaking Amish apart from the other shows is how much is at stake for the stars: their religion, their families, their identities—the very world they've known up until now.

Detractors of reality TV often decry the genre as exploitative, but usually the show's stars exploit themselves. Subjects are often all too willing to divulge the worst parts of their personalities to nab more airtime. As journalist Lillian Ross said decades ago, loquacious sources tend to "violate their own privacy." Even the most extreme examples of questionable taste, like Toddlers and Tiaras, are not exploitative because the girls are already being pimped by their own parents, and by the pageant industry in general. TLC cameras simply swoop in and document a sensational story that is already underway. And breakout reality stars play along. On the wildly popular Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, Mama and Sugar Bear ham up their redneck tics for higher ratings, and in hopes of being renewed for a second season. Real Housewives know how to stay relevant by stirring up the most drama in the highest hemline. Reality stars play along because they know it will benefit them, in the form of endorsement deals, a devoted Twitter following, and spin-off shows.

Snooki might lose control of her bowels in a drunken stupor, but she's probably not going to lose work. Rather, she'll get jobs because of it. This is the brand she has built to pay her bills. Teresa Giudice might fling a table at her family, but she will sell more cookbooks that way. But the genre becomes exploitative when the pay off isn't so clear for the participants. That's why TruTV's Hardcore Pawn is so unpalatable. Set in the ghetto of Detroit, cameras capture desperate people (almost all of whom are African-American, some of whom are on drugs) attempting to pawn prized possessions to white storeowners for a few bucks. Producers create a narrative for the audience to laugh at the people on camera, not with them. The genre also teeters on exploitation when the subjects are not fully informed about the consequences of their participation. Celebrity Rehab documents washed-up stars of yesteryear at the nadir of their careers, irresponsibly corralling them into the camera's way while still in the throes of recovery. How can a person high on crystal meth or in the midst of a decade-long bender make a fully informed decision to be videotaped?

Similarly, how could an Amish young person, who has grown up without electricity or ever being photographed, possibly comprehend the consequences of having his drunken exploits filmed for posterity? Not only is the idea of the participants of Breaking Amish making a fully informed decision dubious, but the stakes are also quite high. If an Amish decides not to return to their community after rumpsringa, they are shunned, and must give up all contact with their family. But in the first episode of Breaking Amish, the show alludes to the fact that the cast members' agreeing to be on camera has already strained relationships to a breaking point. TLC plays up this drama. Sabrina, a 20-year-old of Italian and Puerto Rican extraction who was adopted by Mennonite parents, tells cameras, "I'm nervous about going to New York because I know there's no going back. I'll lose a lot of my friends. If I sacrifice everything I have and it doesn't work out, I'll have nothing." Over a tense last supper, Abe's mother tells him flat out, "If you go to New York, you're going to be shunned." Like drinking and fighting, a good old-fashioned shunning makes for stylized TV drama. But unlike the guidos and guidettes of Jersey Shore, this cast won't have a home to return to when filming ends. Most everyone can agree that reality TV is fake. But that conventional wisdom has probably not entered the candle-lit homes of the Amish. For members of this community, the consequences of reality television are all too real.

It's not that documenting the Amish is essentially exploitative. National Geographic's Amish: Out of Order centers on Mose Gingerich, a former Amish in Columbia, Missouri, who counsels young Amish runaways. The show portrays a more comprehensive picture of the culture, emphasizing the tight-knit support system rather than TLC's point of view, which Jeremiah sums up as, "Bein' Amish, we can't do nothin'!" Amish: Out of Order follows its subjects' integration into the world, like getting birth certificates and social security numbers (which they've never had before) so they can enroll in high school. The 2002 documentary Devil's Playground by director Lucy Walker deftly follows a group of teens through their rumspringa as they decide whether to stay in the mechanized world or go back to their faith communities. Between 85 and 90 percent of Amish teens return home, and the viewer has a clear understanding of why.

But beyond scintillating montages of good-Amish-girls-gone bad, what makes Breaking Amish exploitative is its central conceit: Why are these kids going to New York? When a cab driver asks Jeremiah what brought him to the city, he responds casually, saying, "Well, I grew up Amish and figured I come see what New York is all about." The stars hail from towns in Pennsylvania, Florida, and Ohio, but only Abe and Rebecca know each other. They make vague allusions to "this opportunity," referring to being plucked by TLC, but the show makes no explicit mention of the false pretenses under which they meet. By framing the series as a documentary a la Devil's Playground, the totally fake structure calls into question the very real emotions and fallout these kids will face. Had the network been more up-front in acknowledging the inorganic, Petri-dish nature of the show in something of a Real World voice over ("Seven strangers are picked to live in a house...") the raw emotions and real experiences would resonate. Some interactions between castmates are revealing, like when the group goes grocery shopping in the second episode, and debate who will cook, since the boys have never dabbled in women's work before. "It's not my job to cook the food," says Jeremiah. "It's not my job either," Kate snaps back. But this scene is quickly followed by the girls getting drunk on cheap red wine in their hotel room. TLC wants the audience to leer, not to learn. Or as Abe poignantly says when the group sets out to Times Square in their incongruous homespun garb and attracts gawking tourists, "Everyone is looking at us like we're stupid."

After two episodes, it's revealed that the cast members have never been on an escalator, worn sunglasses, or taken a shower without a bucket. It remains unclear if Rebecca will find equality among the sexes. Hopefully, she will, because if she doesn't, there's no going home, even though in episode three her grandfather stages a coup to retrieve her from filming. Maybe TLC and National Geographic can team up to film a spin-off series, where the cast of Breaking Amish meets Mose Gingerich to bring them into the supportive fold of the ex-Amish. After this season, it might be the best chance they've got.

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His paranoid style paved the road for Trumpism. Now he fears what’s been unleashed.

Glenn Beck looks like the dad in a Disney movie. He’s earnest, geeky, pink, and slightly bulbous. His idea of salty language is bullcrap.

The atmosphere at Beck’s Mercury Studios, outside Dallas, is similarly soothing, provided you ignore the references to genocide and civilizational collapse. In October, when most commentators considered a Donald Trump presidency a remote possibility, I followed audience members onto the set of The Glenn Beck Program, which airs on Beck’s website, theblaze.com. On the way, we passed through a life-size replica of the Oval Office as it might look if inhabited by a President Beck, complete with a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a large Norman Rockwell print of a Boy Scout.

Should you drink more coffee? Should you take melatonin? Can you train yourself to need less sleep? A physician’s guide to sleep in a stressful age.

During residency, Iworked hospital shifts that could last 36 hours, without sleep, often without breaks of more than a few minutes. Even writing this now, it sounds to me like I’m bragging or laying claim to some fortitude of character. I can’t think of another type of self-injury that might be similarly lauded, except maybe binge drinking. Technically the shifts were 30 hours, the mandatory limit imposed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, but we stayed longer because people kept getting sick. Being a doctor is supposed to be about putting other people’s needs before your own. Our job was to power through.

The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.

Why did Trump’s choice for national-security advisor perform so well in the war on terror, only to find himself forced out of the Defense Intelligence Agency?

How does a man like retired Lieutenant General Mike Flynn—who spent his life sifting through information and parsing reports, separating rumor and innuendo from actionable intelligence—come to promote conspiracy theories on social media?

Perhaps it’s less Flynn who’s changed than that the circumstances in which he finds himself—thriving in some roles, and flailing in others.

In diagnostic testing, there’s a basic distinction between sensitivity, or the ability to identify positive results, and specificity, the ability to exclude negative ones. A test with high specificity may avoid generating false positives, but at the price of missing many diagnoses. One with high sensitivity may catch those tricky diagnoses, but also generate false positives along the way. Some people seem to sift through information with high sensitivity, but low specificity—spotting connections that others can’t, and perhaps some that aren’t even there.

“Well, you’re just special. You’re American,” remarked my colleague, smirking from across the coffee table. My other Finnish coworkers, from the school in Helsinki where I teach, nodded in agreement. They had just finished critiquing one of my habits, and they could see that I was on the defensive.

I threw my hands up and snapped, “You’re accusing me of being too friendly? Is that really such a bad thing?”

“Well, when I greet a colleague, I keep track,” she retorted, “so I don’t greet them again during the day!” Another chimed in, “That’s the same for me, too!”

Unbelievable, I thought. According to them, I’m too generous with my hellos.

When I told them I would do my best to greet them just once every day, they told me not to change my ways. They said they understood me. But the thing is, now that I’ve viewed myself from their perspective, I’m not sure I want to remain the same. Change isn’t a bad thing. And since moving to Finland two years ago, I’ve kicked a few bad American habits.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

Democrats who have struggled for years to sell the public on the Affordable Care Act are now confronting a far more urgent task: mobilizing a political coalition to save it.

Even as the party reels from last month’s election defeat, members of Congress, operatives, and liberal allies have turned to plotting a campaign against repealing the law that, they hope, will rival the Tea Party uprising of 2009 that nearly scuttled its passage in the first place. A group of progressive advocacy groups will announce on Friday a coordinated effort to protect the beneficiaries of the Affordable Care Act and stop Republicans from repealing the law without first identifying a plan to replace it.

They don’t have much time to fight back. Republicans on Capitol Hill plan to set repeal of Obamacare in motion as soon as the new Congress opens in January, and both the House and Senate could vote to wind down the law immediately after President-elect Donald Trump takes the oath of office on the 20th.

Trinidad has the highest rate of Islamic State recruitment in the Western hemisphere. How did this happen?

This summer, the so-called Islamic State published issue 15 of its online magazine Dabiq. In what has become a standard feature, it ran an interview with an ISIS foreign fighter. “When I was around twenty years old I would come to accept the religion of truth, Islam,” said Abu Sa’d at-Trinidadi, recalling how he had turned away from the Christian faith he was born into.

At-Trinidadi, as his nom de guerre suggests, is from the Caribbean island of Trinidad and Tobago (T&T), a country more readily associated with calypso and carnival than the “caliphate.” Asked if he had a message for “the Muslims of Trinidad,” he condemned his co-religionists at home for remaining in “a place where you have no honor and are forced to live in humiliation, subjugated by the disbelievers.” More chillingly, he urged Muslims in T&T to wage jihad against their fellow citizens: “Terrify the disbelievers in their own homes and make their streets run with their blood.”

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.

The same part of the brain that allows us to step into the shoes of others also helps us restrain ourselves.

You’ve likely seen the video before: a stream of kids, confronted with a single, alluring marshmallow. If they can resist eating it for 15 minutes, they’ll get two. Some do. Others cave almost immediately.

This “Marshmallow Test,” first conducted in the 1960s, perfectly illustrates the ongoing war between impulsivity and self-control. The kids have to tamp down their immediate desires and focus on long-term goals—an ability that correlates with their later health, wealth, and academic success, and that is supposedly controlled by the front part of the brain. But a new study by Alexander Soutschek at the University of Zurich suggests that self-control is also influenced by another brain region—and one that casts this ability in a different light.

The combination of suspicion and reverence that people feel toward the financially successful isn’t unique to the modern era, but reflects a deep ambivalence that goes back to the Roman empire.

In the early 20th century, Dale Carnegie began to travel the United States delivering to audiences a potent message he would refine and eventually publish in his 1936 bestseller, How To Win Friends and Influence People: “About 15 percent of one’s financial success is due to one’s technical knowledge and about 85 percent is due to skill in human engineering—to personality and the ability to lead people.” Carnegie, who based his claim on research done at institutes founded by the industrialist Andrew Carnegie (unrelated), thus enshrined for Americans the notion that leadership was the key to success in business—that profit might be less about engineering things and more about engineering people. Over 30 million copies of Carnegie’s book have been sold since its publication.